Dr. Haim Saadon

More than 65 years have passed since the Tunisian community leaders published their diaries which recorded their experiences during the six-month Nazi occupation of Tunisia. It was very rare and unusual that they were published immediately after the liberation of Tunisia, which took place in May 1943. Robert Borgel, the president of the community, published his diary in 1944 and Paul Ghez, the head of the labor recruitment committee published his some months later. We will never know if each of them knew about the intention of the other to publish a diary that was written during the occupation. As far as I know it was the first and only time that this was done by any Jewish leader in the community in the east in modern times. The haste to publish those diaries proves that they have a unique message to their community, as if to say, “We have done what we could, we have done what was possible to do during this horrible time we experienced with so much incertitude.”

Those diaries were not the only ones to have been published in Tunisia and Algeria. From year to year we discover more diaries from the war period, from the Nazi-occupied areas and from Vichy France.

Over the years the subject was forgotten, and sometimes neglected. Most Holocaust institutions did their best to rescue all sorts of historical documents and to understand the mechanism of the mass murder. The events in North Africa were marginal to those very important tasks of the institutions. From time to time it happened that a scholar found something interesting about North Africa. Oral testimonies from North Africa were rare.

At the end of the 1990s an important changed occurred: institutions began to take an interest in oral testimonies from North Africa, and more scholars tried to write academic work on the subject. Thus, the number of testimonies has grown. On 2001, Jacob André Guez published a diary which was written during his stay at the camp of Bizerte (Au camp de Bizerte journal d’un Juif tunisien interné sous l’occupation allemande, 1942-1943). It was the first publication which was written by an ordinary Jew and which described the daily life in the camp. One of the new historical products is Nataf’s work of publication.

Recently Mr. Claude Nataf, the president of La Société d’histoire des Juifs de Tunisie published a very interesting and unique collection of testimonies (C.Nataf, Les Juifs de Tunisie sous le joug nazi, Le Manuscrit, Paris, 2012). He collected testimonies and documents only from the period of the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. Most of them were collected after the war, probably by Jacques Sabille, Les Juifs de Tunisie sous Vichy et l’Occupation, (a book published in 1950) who was the first to collect and to publish research about this period. In Nataf’s book there are about twenty documents which describe the labor camps in Tunisia. Nataf introduces each document briefly, presenting the interviewee and the historical importance of the testimony. Two of the documents are exceptions: The first is the report of the Jewish Council in Tunis to the French authorities a few days after the liberation of Tunisia (May 15, 1943, pages 25-38). This report, which was signed by Moise Borgel, preceded the publication of the diaries and became the official position of the community vis à vis the events in Tunisia. The second document is the diary of Maximilian Trenner (pages 227-330). Trenner was an Austrian-Jewish refugee who arrived in Tunisia in the thirties and became the official translator for the Germans during this period. After the war he was accused by the French authorities of collaboration and espionage. This diary was known to scholars from the beginning of the research but it is the first time that it has been published and thus completes the official testimonies which are known. All the other testimonies give for the first time a description of most of the camps in Tunisia. Nataf comments on each document and provides important information about the persons, places and events.

Natafs’ book is the third which he published in the important and famous series of publications Collection Temignages de la Shoah. The other two books are the diaries of Robert Borgel and Paul Ghez mentioned above. In each of the books Nataf brings an historical and biographical introduction and important remarks. With this very important work Nataf revived the historical memory of those events.

The Center for Documentation on North-African Jewry during World War II is a special project of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish communities in the North Africa, under the auspices of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Center’s activities focus on Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco during the years 1933-1947 and cover a wide range of issues, including most aspects of Holocaust research.

Recently we discovered an unknown manuscript of Clement Houri, a Jew who lived in Tunis, which describes his daily life during the Nazi occupation period. The Ghez and Houri diaries open new horizons to the research of this period.

Dr. Saadon is Director of the Documentation Center of North African Jewry During WWII at the Ben-Zvi Institute.